CCER: Education is a Data-Driven Science

New Haven, Connecticut – Today, Wednesday, May 20, 2015, the Connecticut Education Association (CEA) released the results of a survey on the impact of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test (SBAC) on teachers and students. In response, Jeffrey Villar, Executive Director of CCER, released the following statement:

“I am baffled by those who continue to rail against reasonable efforts to ensure that we are providing all children with a high quality education and using public resources in the most effective manner possible. Apparently, they expect Connecticut citizens to continue to dole out millions upon millions of dollars annually with no regard for the quality of services provided or student learning outcomes. What industry in our modern world works under such conditions?

“We must rebuke the efforts of those who seek to convince the public that data collection has no place in education. Americans are well aware that data allow us to improve all sorts of industries through informed decision-making. We use data to drive decisions about automobile safety, surgical procedures, and how to control diseases. Likewise, quality data on education is necessary if we really want to improve our system of public education.

“We need data so that we can intervene when schools don’t meet the needs of their students. We need data so that we can monitor gaps in achievement. And we need data so that we can determine which instructional practices are effective for which groups of students, and should be scaled. There is a science to education, and it requires quality data.

“The SBAC takes students the same amount of time to complete as the CMT, but provides higher-quality data that is comparable across states.

“The fight against SBAC is nothing more than a backlash against accountability. It’s a movement that seeks to maintain the status quo, rather than making informed decisions about what students actually need from their schools.”